God in Public

N. T. Wright has been getting heat for expressing his political opinions of late, so I wasn’t sure what to expect from his SBL address on “God in Public.” In the event, I found very little to disagree with, much to affirm heartily, and, as always with Wright, much to delight the soul.

He started with a challenge to the post-Enlightenment separation of religion and politics. He noted, interestingly, that this separation was linked historically and theologically with skepticism about the resurrection of the body. He returned to this point later in the lecture, arguing that the resurrection is the launching of the new creation in the midst of the old and suggesting that denying or downplaying the resurrection is a strategy of power. When the resurrection-as-new-creation is denied, then the new creation (novus ordo saeclorum) can be announced in the 18th century or the twentieth.

He also suggested that the enraged atheism of Dawkins, Hitchens, and others arises from indignation at religion’s refusal to fade decently away. The Enlightenment bequeathed a situation where secularism stands against fundamentalism, but both accept the same duality of faith and politics.

For his SBL audience, he focused the question of Enlightenment dualism of faith and politics on the interpretation of the gospels. Christians since the Reformation and Enlightenment have not known what to do with the gospels. Two apparently opposed but ultimately complicit options have been developed: Seeing the gospel as a story of the kingdom and God’s justice, with the unfortunate ending of a death and resurrection or seeing the gospel as atonement stories with lengthy prologues. He was urging us to read the gospels as a single narrative, as political and atonement narratives, as narratives about the Creator God taking charge of His estranged world precisely through the cross and resurrection of Jesus. The gospel is about God in Public, about the Kingdom of God.

Wright provocatively suggested that the methods of New Testament scholarship were sometimes designed precisely to further the Enlightenment project – to find biblical support for the separation of God and politics that the Enlightenment institutionalized. If New Testament scholarship is going to do justice to the gospels, it will have to develop methods that don’t assume modern dualisms under the cover of scholarly neutrality. He urged a hermeneutics of skepticism toward the methods of NT scholarship, a hermeneutics that uncovers how those methods make NT scholarship complicit with power. The gospels themselves resist such deconstruction, precisely because they climax in a crucifixion that passes judgment on the political and religious powers.

Wright, however, resisted the Anabaptist solution of withdrawal (he mentioned Jim Wallis several times, mostly favorably). Against Anabaptists and revolutionaries, the New Testament does not reject pagan order, but teaches that the church must submit to the rulers that be because order, even pagan and oppressive order, is preferable to chaos. The New Testament holds together the truth that the powers are corrupt with the demand that they be obeyed. This is a sign, Wright said, that the order provided by political authorities is a common good, a good shared by Christians and non-Christians, and a common good that Christians should support and further.

These two things can be held together when we recognize that the cross is the victory over powers that twist their God-given mandate to maintain order into tyranny, but after the cross and resurrection the powers that be are reinstated as agents of order, even agents that Jesus, the heavenly king, uses to advance His purposes. He may use them and then judge them, but they are enclosed within his rule. The Church meanwhile is called to remind rulers of their duty to seek wisdom from the Son, and this witness may result in martyrdom, which, Wright said, is central to any Christian political theology. The church also cultivates forms of common life that anticipate the eschatological kingdom and challenge political authorities to imitation.

In short, because Jesus is Lord, the church can collaborate without compromise and critique without falling into dualism.